On the same day that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said he would leave President Donald Trump’s economic advisory council, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that he would stay.
In a tweet Thursday night, Musk said he would remain as a Trump adviser and attend a meeting with the president on Friday so he could help Trump fix the recent executive order that bans Syrian refugees and nationals from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.
Regarding the meeting at the White House: pic.twitter.com/8b1XH4oW6h
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2017
One likely reason Kalanick quit the advisory council was because his company has been under fire for breaking a temporary taxi strike at New York’s JFK airport during protests last weekend. That led to the #DeleteUber hashtag going viral, and it led to Lyft, Uber’s biggest rival, cracking the top 10 most downloaded apps in Apple’s App Store. Reportedly, 200,000 people deleted their Uber apps.
Unlike Musk, who believes he can help make change by staying on the council, Kalanick said remaining involved with Trump wouldn’t have helped.
“Joining the group was not meant to be an endorsement of the President or his agenda but unfortunately it has been misinterpreted to be exactly that,” Kalanick wrote in a letter published Thursday. “There are many ways we will continue to advocate for just change on immigration but staying on the council was going to get in the way of that.”
Earlier this week, Musk took to social media to crowdsource possible changes to the executive order.
